simple2zoom provides a generic gateway between the Z39.50 and SRU/SRW Information Retrieval protocols.
Because it relies on the Net::Z3950::SimpleServer and ZOOM modules for the server and client funcationality respectively,
because both of these modules are based on the YAZ toolkit,
and because YAZ transparently handles all three standard IR protocols (ANDI/NISO Z39.50,
SRU and SRW),
it can function as a gateway from any and to any of these protocols.
However,
its principle purpose is as a Z39.50 server that proxies requests through to a backend by acting as an SRU client.

Specifies that the named configFile should be used to configure the functionality of the gateway: if this option is not specified,
then the file client.xml is used.
The format of the configuration file is described separately in Net::Z3950::Simple2ZOOM::Config,
and a sample configuration file,
test.xml,
is supplied in the etc directory of the distribution.

These options provide the means to control many aspects of the gateway's functioning: for example,
whether the server forks a new process for each client or runs a single process using select(); how (if at all) to interpret incoming SRU requests; whether and how to log protocol packets for debugging.

One or more YAZ-style listener addresses may be specified,
and the server will accept connections on those addresses: for example,
@:9998,
unix:/tmp/somesocket or ssl:myhost.com:210.
If no explicit listener addresses are provided,
the server listens on port 9999.

The development of simple2zoom,
and the Net::Z3950::Simple2ZOOM library that provides its functionality,
has been partially sponsored by the National Library of Australia,
whose contribution we gratefully acknowledge.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself,
either Perl version 5.8.8 or,
at your option,
any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.